Domestic Disturbances

Cambridge, Massachusetts (January 17, 2012)

‘Noam Chomsky – Power Systems: Conversations with David Barsamian on Global Democratic Uprisings and the new challenges to U.S. Empire’ [Hamish Hamilton, 2013]:

DB:… In late 2011, ‘New York Times’ columnist David Brooks reported that a Gallup poll showed that in answer to the question “Which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future – big business, big labor, or big government?” close to 65 percent of respondents said the government and 26 percent said corporations. Is that an example of the persuasion and manufacturing of consent that you alluded to?

NC: If you look a little bit beyond that question and you ask, “What do you want the government to do?” the answer will be, “Stop bailing out the banks. That’s why I hate the government don’t bail out the banks. Stop freeing the rich from taxes. I want more taxes on the rich. Increase spending on health and education.” And so on down the line. So yes, the question is framed so that people like David Brooks can draw this conclusion.

Take welfare. There’s strong public opposition to welfare. On the other hand, there’s strong public support for what welfare does. So if you ask the question, “should we spend more on welfare?” No. “Should we spend more on aid to women with dependent children?” Yes. That’s successful propaganda. Welfare has been successfully demonized. Reagan took a big step forward on that, sort of constructing an image of welfare as meaning a rich black woman who drives to the welfare office in her chauffeured limousine and takes away your hard-earned money. Nobody is in favour of that, so no welfare. But what about a mother with a child that she can’t feed? Oh, yes, we’re in favour of helping her.

In fact, if you look at the 1960s, there were significant changes in the way these issues were conceived. A useful study of this shift just came out in ‘Political Science Quarterly’. The New Deal conception was that support for people’s needs was a right. So, say, a mother with dependent children had a right to food for her children. That began to shift in the 1960s. As the welfare system was expanded, a shift began toward the conception that you can get support but you really ought to be working, ultimately leading to the move from welfare to workfare. By the time you get to Clinton, the right to food for your children is not really a right. It’s only something until you get a job, which is what you ought to be doing. This is based on the idea that taking care of children isn’t work. It’s an amazing conception. Anyone who has taken care of children knows it’s work, hard work. Even from an economic point of view, adopting the rather ugly terminology of standard economics it creates what’s called “human capital” In economics courses, human capital, the quality of the workforce, is terribly important. How do you get human capital in a four-year-old child? When the mother is at home taking care of him, not letting him run out in the streets while she’s washing dishes in a restaurant. And, of course there’s almost no support for the working family, so you destroy the family. It’s a very striking shift in mentality.

The driving force behind these changes is people who claim that they are fighting for “family values.’ The people who call themselves conservatives say, “We have to maintain family values by preventing women from having a choice as to whether they will have children, and then by not giving them any support when they have to take care of their children. That’s how we preserve family values.” The internal contradictions are amazing. …